(Micro)film Studies

I live and work far from the place where I was born, so the past I research is a country twice foreign. When people ask why I research Scottish cinema history rather than Colombian, I confess that the reason is not an intense passion for this rainy corner of Europe but because I am here. I wanted to do archive work, and so my topic would need to be local. It is easy to underestimate the degree to which simple availability and access can determine entire research paths. And therefore it is easy to misunderstand the significance of the transformations brought about by digitization and online access to sources.

Like many people, I like archives. What I like even more is traveling to archives. They give you a hidden purpose, both in tourist-thronged cities and unprepossessing industrial outskirts. The quest takes you on slow train lines, gets you lost, makes you hitch rides and despair in snow blizzards—all much more enticing than spending another day in front of the computer. Having the choice speaks of privilege: I can travel easily (as long as no visa is required), and I have the right credentials—for now—to pass as a bona fide researcher in the eyes of the gatekeepers. These conditions are contingent on institutional status, political climate, physical mobility, and how society parses class and race markers. Whatever its limitations, the internet has removed barriers to curiosity and has challenged the geographical exclusivity of postcode-lottery access to knowledge.

The online database and the archive reading room are different vectors of experience, but they are complementary rather than opposed. Any archive visit is preceded and followed by many more hours of looking at a screen. Remote access to archive catalogs motivates travel to an archive in the first place. We tend to take them for granted, but online catalogs are extraordinary resources. Aggregation portals that bring together the holdings of many different institutions, such as Scottish Archive Network¹ and the Archives Hub,² are astonishing achievements. This infrastructure enables new forms of discovery. For instance, in Australia, the Humanities Networked Infrastructure project allows researchers to document relationships between different archival entities, offering ways to represent and share the expertise involved in discovering these connections.³

It is really the ability to make these connections—as much as access to original materials—that facilitates good research. Carolyn Steedman, in Dust, articulates this archival passion. She writes that the historian's authority "comes from having been there (the train to the distant city, the call number, the bundle opened, the dust …)."⁴ While such "dirty," "dusty" archival work is seen as a professional rite of passage, this really annoys the archivists who work very hard at making archives clean, bright, easy to use, and accessible.⁵ It also installs a specific professional practice as a kind of moral imperative. And yet, archive work is not always necessary or morally superior. What it is, often, is moving and beautiful. There is the aura of the original as an emotional connection to the past but also as material evidence—not only about the moment of its creation but also about the unbroken series of events that have allowed this object to travel from the past to now, leaving traces all over it. The archival document, in Arlette Farge's words, "is a tear in the fabric of time" that produces in the reader an "insistent and stubborn" feeling of being in contact with the real.⁶

In the spirit of generosity, let us believe that it is this feeling, rather than professional defensiveness and a Calvinist work ethic, that makes many historians wary of mechanical and electronic reproduction of sources. This is not new; Farge, for instance, writes that "an archival manuscript is a living document; microfilm reproduction, while sometimes unavoidable, can drain the life out of it."⁷ Microfilm: a technology that has been around since the 1920s. A reel of microfilm is the thing most similar to a movie reel and also the most alien to it. Like an exhibition print, the microfilm reel is an...